


And You Thought The Boy Band AU Was Cringe

by putconspiraciesinit



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, 19th Century CE RPF, American Revolution RPF, Historical RPF, Political RPF - US 19th c.
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Half-Vampires, Rating May Change, Religious Conflict, Religious Discussion, Tags May Change, Vampires, Warnings May Change, not as awful as it sounds i swear
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 04:48:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19881898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/putconspiraciesinit/pseuds/putconspiraciesinit
Summary: anyway MAD props to my friend joki she did a lot of the development for this au and it was her idea i'm just writing itvampires are not creepy sex gods in this story this aint twilightthey're also not ugly horror monsters this aint dracula......aaron burr really did look like a vampire lowkey





	And You Thought The Boy Band AU Was Cringe

Most vampires liked to say the classic stories and myths “got it all wrong,” but that was mainly because most vampires were sick and tired of humans thinking they were a living sexual metaphor. Really, the stories weren’t horribly accurate or inaccurate. They got some things right, they got some things wrong; they were  _ stories _ , stories were always like that.

***

“The cross causes us pain as a reminder of what we truly are. We are not beings of power; we serve God, and only God. We have these abilities because we were chosen by Him to punish the unrighteous.”

“Isn’t that...you know...His job?”

“Do not question Him, child! Do you presume to know God? Pride is one of the greatest sins of them all!”

Really, Aaron  _ did _ presume to know God. God, as he had been taught to know Him, was an awful lot like Timothy and Rhoda. Never telling anyone  _ why _ He was always making them suffer. Constantly punishing people with horrible pain for any minor offense, and sometimes even offenses that hadn’t been committed yet. Expecting utter reverance from everybody below Him for no reason besides that He existed and was God. Anybody who dared to disobey or even briefly question this was doomed to live a life of misery and pain, before dying and being sent to Hell, where they would be subjected to torture beyond putting into words for the rest of all eternity.

(That last part was a bit beyond Timothy or Rhoda’s abilities, but they along with the rest of their family took a great deal of pleasure (if indeed they could even  _ feel _ such an emotion) in facilitating the process.)

And so, all this in mind, Aaron Burr felt he knew exactly what sort of person God was, if He could be called that. And in his mind, this meant it made perfect sense for people like the Edwards family to be creatures of God. It was all the same, they were all cruel and really loved to hurt and kill people. Maybe thinking this was blasphemy, but what was God going to do about it? Aaron couldn’t die--not easily, at least--and he felt confident saying his life was already miserable, so realistically, God’s options were limited.

***

Timothy would go out hunting every three or so days. He turned about two-thirds of the people he attacked, and brought the bodies of the others back home for the rest of the family to drain. He and Rhoda never sugarcoated what exactly it was that their victims had done that made them “unrighteous,” nor did they sugarcoat what exactly happened to them. The Edwards children, being  _ born _ vampires and having never known any ideology besides their parents’ one, did not seem to object.

The Burr children were a bit more reserved about it. They were, after all, half human. It feels an awful lot weirder drinking all the blood out of a human body when you are pretty close to being human yourself. Sally gave in eventually; her health was already dangerously fragile and she did not need to add malnutrition to that. Aaron found it harder. It wasn’t an actual choice, most of the time, since a favorite punishment of Rhoda’s was ordering disobedient children to fast for some ungodly amount of time, so by the time Aaron was actually allowed to consume  _ any _ sort of food, be it blood or human food (being only half vampire, Aaron could sustain himself functionally without blood--it just wasn’t at all healthy), he was usually too desperate to turn anything down.

He justified it to himself by reminding himself that he never personally killed anyone. Timothy and his brothers did all the hunting. Aaron was rarely allowed outside the house at all. Technically,  _ he  _ hadn’t harmed any humans. He wasn’t like that. He had never considered the concept that he wouldn’t be living with Timothy and his brothers forever.

***

At the College, for once in his life, Aaron was actually  _ relieved _ that everybody knew he was the son of the late Reverend Aaron Burr. Normally he hated it. Hardly ever even let anyone use his first name because of it. But one important thing about the Reverend was that he was  _ human _ . Everybody knew that. He had actually had to prove it once, since he definitely  _ looked _ like a vampire, but he had been  _ able _ to prove it. And so who in their right mind was going to suspect the boy who was known to be his son of being a vampire?

Throughout those two-ish years, Aaron still couldn’t bring himself to actually drain anybody. He definitely thought about a couple of people at the College he could stand to see die, but the thought of actually personally attacking those people and drinking their blood?  _ Eugh _ . Besides, Aaron was barely five feet tall and scrawny and fifteen years old and had no experience with physical altercations, and being half-human, he didn’t have the superhuman strength a full vampire would have. That was it. He wasn’t being a coward, he was just being  _ reasonable _ . Sure, a human couldn’t kill him without the right tools and an ungodly amount of training, but they could sure as  _ hell _ hurt him.

In his time at the College, he only actually drank blood two or three times, and both times, it was because Matt had killed someone and persuaded Aaron to finish them off because he obviously needed it. (Aaron didn’t really count the time he had drained a wild goose that had attacked him when he was in a bad mood, because wild animals that attacked people didn’t count.)

***

As if being the son of Reverend Burr wasn’t enough,  _ nobody _ would imagine any sane vampire could join the army.

Of course, that wasn’t why Burr joined the army. He wanted to fight for his nation’s independence. He was as caught up in the patriotic fervor sweeping America as what seemed like just about every nineteen-year-old boy in the country. In fact, that patriotic fervor was so strong that even Matt and his brother, who were right proper vampires, joined.

Burr had a feeling Colonel Arnold knew they were vampires, and agreed to let them stay out of the sun and mostly do things that had to be done at night--and the weather was by human standards  _ horrible _ , the sun almost never fully came out anyway. Just in case, they wore very wide brimmed hats instead of the tricorn ones everyone else was wearing. The thing about the Ogdens, though, is that the shorter of the two was six-foot-five. And both were quite muscular. Nobody in their right mind was going to go up to either of those two giants and accuse them of being a vampire, because whatever the answer was, nobody wanted any sort of quarrel with them.

***

Sure, Burr didn’t have outright superhuman strength, but he was noticeably resilient for a tiny nineteen-year-old, and he was also functionally immortal. These were huge advantages in a war. Before long--just after the first real battle he ended up participating in--he was practically a renowned hero. Definitely a renownedly exceptional soldier. People  _ liked _ him.

***

Even during the war, for the first while, Burr didn’t kill--or, well, he did. He shot people, slashed and stabbed a few. He was a soldier. But he never drained anyone, except for the usual exception of Matt dragging in some corpse and telling him to. It felt different for whatever reason. At this point he could no longer claim he was just being reasonable; there were bodies everywhere, given that they were at  _ war _ and all that. No, he was definitely just squicked.

That Winter at Valley Forge, he was able to get away with killing a horse, given that horses were dying of exposure anyway; one more wasn’t going to raise eyebrows.

***

“You know,” said Matt, “I started hunting and draining people when I was younger than you are now. I  _ think  _ I was about fifteen, or so, the first time.”

Burr rolled his eyes. “It’s different for you.”

“Well, it isn’t  _ too _ awfully different, is it?”

“I am a bit human, aren’t I? I suppose for you and your family and the Edwardses, humans are just about a different species of sorts. There’s a...a separation.”

“Hm. Well, just try not to starve yourself into incapacitation.”

“There’s always animals.”

“And how often have any of us got the time to go out and track down wild animals?”

“You have got a point, there.”

***

If a vampire were to stand outside in the sun, they would die. Not instantaneously, and it wouldn’t be too awfully gruesome, but sunlight weakened vampires dangerously fast. For someone with a lot of stamina, five minutes was enough. For someone with average stamina, two or three.

Burr had never tested how long he could last outside in the sun. Five minutes didn’t do anything. Nor ten, twenty, thirty--by an hour, he was usually a lot more exhausted than a normal human with average stamina might be. But it didn’t kill him, and he was usually able to avoid being in full direct sunlight for more than an hour and a half.

After 3 years in the army, he had obviously become far too confident in his ability to endure the sun like a human. One particularly long, drawn-out battle in June 1778 it was just too much and Burr fainted and the next thing he knew he was waking up and two weeks had passed. Everyone who didn’t know thought it had been the heat (the battle of Monmouth had taken place in about one-hundred-degree weather). In reality, Burr was far more tolerant to heat than most humans, since his human “side” really needed a normal human body temperature, but the vampire “side” made that incredibly difficult. It was the biggest inconvenience of being what he was; he was always so damned  _ cold _ . What had really gotten to him at Monmouth was the sunlight itself, but Burr definitely wasn’t going to correct anyone.

Upon waking, Burr figured he couldn’t be badly injured. That he would be back on his feet leading his regiment into battle within a day or so.

Months later, this was not the case.

***

For a while, realizing he was going to need a lot of time to bounce back, Burr actually left the army. But he did not want to leave the war effort altogether, and as soon as he could function properly without assistance again he rejoined. This time, however, he had no intention of simply acting as though he were fully human and just hoping for the best. That was how he had managed to knock himself into a coma at Monmouth.

_ ‘I’m  _ not _ human _ ,’ he thought.  _ ‘I’m not really a vampire, either. I’m something else. But whatever that something else is, it is not a human being.’ _

***

Matt stared. “Well, this is a surprise!”

Burr unceremoniously dropped the body onto the table.

“Did you…” began Matt.

“Yes,” said Burr. “I figured...well, you know. We’re at war. He or I, one of us would have killed the other back there anyway."


End file.
